The good folks over at Miller-McCunehave chimed in on the subject, too, by way of song lyrics. Apparently the trend over the last few decades in pop music lyrics has gone from “we” to “me.”

“Vocalists often warm up by singing “Mi, mi, mi, mi, mi,” writes Tom Jacobs. “But increasingly, the songs they perform—or at least those that make the top 10 lists—are odes to ‘Me, me, me, me, me.’”

Using something called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program researchers analyzed lyrics, looking for words that would imply a shift to “a focus on the self,” such as first-person singular pronouns (I, me, mine), as opposed to first-person plural pronouns (we, us, our). The researchers also found an increase in “words reflecting anger or antisocial behavior (hate, kill, damn).”

So, what does it all mean? In the spirit of all this self-love, why don’t you tell us?

(Related: See “Lonely Together” from the March-April issue of Utne Reader, about John Cacioppo, who argues that loneliness isn’t some personality defect or sign of weakness—it’s a survival impulse like hunger or thirst, a trigger pushing us toward the nourishment of human companionship.)

I've thought that the "Mi mi mi" sung by tenors came from Rodolfo's lament at Mimi's death in Boheme. As for narcissism, consider the BBC's quartet series "Century of the Self," showing how Edward Bernays' retailoring of Freud's ideas created PR and prevented precious democracy from being left to the people. Result: self-absorbed consumers of product, and a wholly-owned government subsidiary of business.